The Cambridge Companion to LEIBNIZ

NICHOLAS JOLLEY 1 Introduction Many people first came across the name "Leibniz" when reading Voltaire's Candide, and the encounter is not likely to inspire confi- dence in Leibniz as a great philosopher. In Voltaire's biting satire, the optimism of Doctor Pangloss - whose character is based either on Leibniz himself or on his disciples - appears as a foolish and almost wickedly complacent response to the evils of our world. The reader cannot help but sympathize with Candide's rhetorical question: "If this is the best of all possible worlds, . what can the rest be like?"= Even initial exposure to Leibniz's own texts is not always encourag- ing. Perhaps the most widely read of Leibniz's works is the Mo- nadology, and although, in many respects, a brilliant summary of his final metaphysical views, it is not the best introduction to his philosophy. It is natural to feel, as Bertrand Russell once did, that we are presented with "a kind of metaphysical fairy tale, coherent perhaps, but wholly arbitrary" ;"art of the problem is that the fairy tale meta- physics is presented to us in a "take it or leave it" manner with little in the way of sustained argument. Initially, then, Leibniz's reputation as a philosophical genius of the first rank may strike us as puzzling. Deeper acquaintance with Leibniz's work should serve to dispel these doubts. Leibniz did indeed hold that this is the best of all possible worlds, but this thesis is not the complacent nonsense that it appears to be. A little reflection shows that it is a fairly natural position to take up in response to problems of philosophical theol- ogy. For if God is essentially good, then it is difficult - but not impossible - to escape the conclusion that the world that he created must be the best of those alternatives available to him. Moreover, and more importantly, Leibniz's apparatus of possible worlds pro- vides a compelling and influential framework for tackling deep prob- Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 2 Introduction lems about necessity, contingency, and free will. Although the inter- pretation of Leibniz is controversial in this area, it is largely within this framework that he seeks to do justice to our intuition that Julius Caesar, for example, might have done otherwise than cross the Rubicon. Or consider the Monadology. Far from being a gratu- itous metaphysical fairy tale, the theory of monads is, in fact, a solution to the problem of determining the fundamental building- blocks of reality consistent with Leibniz's conviction that matter is infinitely divisible. Moreover, the theory of monads has remarkable parallels with modern metaphysical theories such as reductive materialism. The reductive materialist seeks to argue that all that fundamentally exists is matter, and that apparently nonmaterial things, such as minds, are, in reality, physical items - namely brains. In a structurally similar way, Leibniz argues that all that fundamentally exists is minds (strictly, souls), and that bodies can somehow be reduced to mental entities. Indeed, the theory of monads is a kind of idealist mirror image of modern reductive materialism. Reductive materialism may appear today to be more intuitive than the reductive idealism of the Monadology, but the underlying debate is very far from being concluded in the materialist's favor.3 Leibniz shares with Descartes and Spinoza the deep conviction that human reason is competent to discover the ultimate nature of reality, and, for this reason, he is traditionally classified with them as a "Rationalist" philosopher. Yet though Leibniz shares their ambitious conception of the philosophical enterprise, in important respects he stands apart from the other two. Descartes and, less explic- itly, Spinoza impress the reader by their insistence on the need to make a clean break with the philosophical past in order to arrive at the truth: the edifice of knowledge must be reconstructed on new foundations. As Descartes said, "I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish any- thing at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.I14 Leibniz, by contrast, is much less of a revolutionary in spirit; he is far more respectful of the whole philosophical tradition deriving from the Greeks. Although at times he can be a sharp polemicist, the entire tendency of his philosophy is to seek synthesis and reconciliation wherever possible. As he himself puts it, "the majority of the philosophical sects are right in the greater part of what they affirm, Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 Introduction 3 but not so much in what they deny" (Letter to Remond, 10 January 1714, G I11 607). Particularly during his earlier career, Leibniz sought to reconcile the new mechanical philosophy of the Scientific Revolu- tion with the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition which Descartes and Spinoza largely rejected. Leibniz's eirenical habit of mind is not confined to his philosophy; it displays itself further in the various schemes for political and religious reconciliation which occupied him throughout his career. Leibniz's preoccupation with peace and reconciliation is under- standable, for the Germany of his youth had been ravaged by the horrors of the Thirty Years' War - a war in which dynastic and religious rivalries were inextricably involved. Leibniz, born in Leipzig in 1646, was the son of a university professor. After his father's death in 165 2, the prodigiously gifted boy had the run of the family library, and he soon showed the tendency towards polymathy which was a hall- mark of his whole career. As Roger Ariew notes (see Chapter z),Leib- niz, having taught himself Latin at seven or eight, embarked on a vast reading course of poets, orators, historians, jurists, philosophers, mathematicians, and theologians. Leibniz was later educated at the universities of Leipzig and Jena, but he was, to a large extent, self- taught and retained some of the habits of mind of the autodidact; he never acquired the ability to wear his immense learning lightly. Although he was offered a university post, Leibniz, like other great thinkers of the seventeenth century, turned his back on an academic career. His contemporaries' reasons for rejecting academic careers are clear; the universities of the age were bastions of the "old" learning, offering little exposure to the ferment of new ideas associated with the Scientific Revolution. Leibniz's motives for rejecting an academic career may have been different and more com- plex, for he never harbored the contempt for Scholastic learning that is characteristic of Descartes or Hobbes. Leibniz may have been guided at least in part by the feeling that a university setting would not afford him an adequate outlet for his own full range of interests, which included politics, religion, and diplomacy, as well as philosophy and science. Most of Leibniz's life was spent in the service of minor German courts, where he took advantage of the opportunities offered to devote his energies to political and religious projects. For instance, during his employment in the service of the Elector of Mainz, Leibniz conceived the idea of diverting French expansionist Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006 4 Introduction ambitions away from Germany towards Egypt, and he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Paris to try to interest Louis XIV in this scheme. (The idea, never actually proposed to Louis' ministers, was later taken up by Napoleon.) After his return from Paris, Leibniz entered the service of the Electors of Hanover - his final employer, Georg Ludwig, ascended the British throne as George I. In addition to his official duties as court librarian and historian, Leibniz busied himself with projects for political and religious reconciliation. One such project was an ambitious scheme for reuniting the Catholic and Protestant churches; as Ariew shows (see Chapter z), Leibniz displayed great intellectual subtlety in seeking to find doctrinal for- mulae on which both sides could agree. Many of Leibniz's schemes were no doubt impractical and unrealistic, and despite his extensive network of connections (carried on through a vast correspondence) all over Europe, Leibniz never seems to have had the knack of pull- ing strings. On the other hand, the recent history of our own time should make us cautious in passing judgment about what is and is not possible in the realm of politics, for some of Leibniz's schemes have an almost eerily prophetic quality. For instance, Leibniz's con- cern with trying to establish a degree of sovereignty for German princes within the framework of the Holy Roman Empire antici- pates current concerns about the place of nation-states within a united Europe. Leibniz's diplomatic mission took him to Paris in 1672, and he stayed there for four years. At that time, Paris was the intellectual capital of Europe. Leibniz took full advantage of the opportunities it offered; he made great strides in the study of mathematics (discover- ing the differential calculus, independently of Newton, in I 67 5 ) and he immersed himself in the study of the philosophy of the Moderns and of the French Cartesians, in particular. Yet, as Stuart Brown argues (see Chapter 31, despite Leibniz's exposure to the thought of the Modems, other strands of seventeenth-century thought are no less important for understanding Leibniz. In addition to the Mod- erns, Brown isolates the Scholastic and Renaissance strands for spe- cial attention. Leibniz's links with the Scholastic tradition are evi- dent not just in his characteristic insistence on reconciling Aristotle and the Modems, but also in the very choice of problems to place on the philosophical agenda.

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